Consternations

01/23/2013

You’re having a hard time with friends at school just now.
You’re feeling bossed, teased, left out, made to sit with girls, and generally
on the outs.

I want one or several of the following:

to whisk you away from it all;

to sneak slimy mud into the sandwiches of anyone
who hurts your feelings;

to hold a private meeting with each of your
classmates explaining why you’re the best;

to give you a superpower where your skin gets thick at crucial times.

I really do want these abilities sometimes. I totally feel
it when you’re sad, and I know how sensitive you are (I am too). But then I
think a little more and I know I have to let you figure it out and feel the bad
stuff as well as the good. You’re going to feel each extreme hard no
matter what age you are, I’m pretty sure. I’ll coach you as much as I can …
tell you to say “whatever” rather than react too much, walk away, shrug as if
it didn’t touch you. But we’re not really “whatever” people, you and me.
So all I can do, it seems, is love you through it. I will.

10/11/2011

I'm finding it pretty hard to dress for my needs right now. I need to feel like I'm not really forty; I need to not succumb to sweat pants and forget that I still have a few pounds to lose; I need to be more than a mom; yet I need to be comfortable and flexible when I'm out with the kids. These needs are contradictory, so I'm usually a "fashion" mish-mash when I'm out (though not, I hope, as bad as it was in the months after O): stretchy jeans and a t-shirt are the norm.

I thought I was doing okay until a few weeks ago O came up behind me as I was crouching with Georgia showing her something among a group of people.

"MOM! Your bum is hanging out of your pants!! It's out!"

Much laughter from the group, and I joined in of course, horrified. It seems stretchy jeans stretch out all ways and are quite accomodating of a bum's need to be released from its confines.

So now I'm cinching up the belts, but I'm not oblivious to the fact that this succeeds in locking the lower bum in but actually encourages the upper bum (i.e., the back muffin) to escape gleefully out the top. What to do?

I guess a little more diet and exercise ("I'm a busy mom" doesn't quite cut it when it comes to actual results). That or ... the dreaded mom jeans, defined by the website StyleHog as: "Unflattering, tapered, high-waisted, pleated creations whose sole purpose is to add comfort to a woman's wardrobe, while simultaneously destroying her appearance."

08/05/2011

Oliver and I are at it again: another night of gourmet baking (okay, maybe our third or fourth ever) and destroying the kitchen. We continue to knock it out of the park on presentation marks alone; tonight’s creation rivalled even our cupcakes in terms of colour and texture.

We found an exciting kid’s food site, Weelicious, and set our sights high—Fruit on the Bottom Tapioca—despite my vague feelings of revulsion about the gummy, fish-egg-evoking stuff. It (see image to left) looked so fresh … and that gleaming white-on-red contrast! The only thing we could imagine improving was the lack of garnish, so we popped out to our handy herb garden out front and picked whatever mint the earwigs hadn’t hit.

The mint, it turned out, was the best thing about it (that’s why you don’t see it in our image below). We tried to swallow but it kinda hurt and we worried a little about ever being able to open our mouths again. We tried to make dada eat two servings but he wouldn’t. Even Baby Sis seemed uninterested. So, we thanked good God above that dada hadn’t yet eaten all the Haagen Daz in the freezer and polished that off.

The way we see it, we don’t want to peak too soon. And no, I don't know what that squiggly orange thing amid the muck-crust is. And yeah, that's our wet laundry hanging on wood chairs. It's clean. Just wet.

09/23/2008

You know when you bump into someone you are wholly, massively, totally unprepared to bump into? When your mouth gums up, your brain freezes, and a thick, whooshing vibration invades your ears, blocking out all relevant sound? When your interior dialogue drowns out the conversation you’re supposed to be having?

It happened to me last week. The context: a much-deserved appointment with my hairdresser, Kelli. My hair was a bushy, frayed, SOS-pad of blond mixed with dull brown and grey at the roots and it was time to take action. I showed up to the salon without thinking twice about my ensemble since I knew I would be mercifully covered in the same salon robe every other client would be wearing. As a result, my outfit could only be described as soccer-mom meets lady-who-feeds-the-pigeons-in-the-park: bright, white running shoes, slouchy, stretchy, long black shorts, shapeless t-shirt with traces of hastily wiped-off spitup, and the piece de résistance … plastic Safeway bag to hold my wallet since I couldn’t find my purse in the wreck of my baby-bombed apartment.

Not ten minutes into the soothing sounds of Kelli’s scissors, I heard her exclaim: “Jeff!” I passed a quick hand over my mouth to wipe away possible drool and squinted into the mirror. There stood Jeff. Not any Jeff. Jeff, my good friend from my life pre-Oliver. Seriously pre-Oliver … I knew Jeff in a period of my life when I went to the gym, smoked more than I ate, got my eyebrows waxed, and wore only uncomfortable shoes that tore into the skin on my feet. We partied hard and we looked good, and that was about all that mattered for a while.

Now—six years since I had last seen him—stood Jeff, not two feet away from me. Two feet away from the bright white trainers poking out under my robe. Two feet away from my post-partum dumpling of a bum. Two feet away from the plastic bag tucked under Kelli’s station. Two feet too close for my state of dishevelment.

After big hugs, Jeff sat down in the chair right beside me and we began to catch up. Except I couldn’t hear him. The mouth on his handsome face was obviously forming words, and I was nodding furiously to show my grasp of these words, but I was taking nothing in. All I could think was:

“Jeff here. Plastic bag under chair. Must give back robe before leaving premises. Will be me leaving before Jeff. Jeff will see me leave. Oh God, Jeff will see me leave.”

At a certain point, Jeff must have caught on that I wasn’t listening. He asked mischievously, “You like that sort of thing?” in reference to his description of his current job. I mumbled, “Yes, well yes, I like the industry.” I knew he was in the pharmaceutical field so I thought there was a slim chance I had responded in some way appropriately. Later I was able to piece together what he had actually said … something about his role helping doctors use defibrillators on urgent cardiac arrest patients. “I like the industry.” Nice.

Then sadly, Kelli declared my hair done. I murmured my approval, concurred with Jeff that I’d see him when I came back from the changing room, then slunk away from the chair. I saw a back-door exit and contemplated making a run for it. I didn’t. But neither did I trot back to Kelli’s chair to say a real goodbye to Jeff. I snuck quietly to the front desk, paid, then ran like the wind to the door, humming madly to block the sound of the plastic bag crinkling and crackling beside me. The horror.